scholarly journals Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 979-1006
Author(s):  
Danna Agmon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Court Records ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Archival History ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps—physical, historiographical, and epistemological—to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history—questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty—with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie’s early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.

The Hokkiens in early modern Hoi An, Batavia, and Manila: Political agendas and selective adaptations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Boyi Chen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Early History ◽  
Adaptive Behaviour ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

This article focuses on how political agendas and existing societal circumstances in three Southeast Asian regions impacted the early history of immigrant Hokkiens, one of the most prominent Chinese ethnic groups. The article argues that different Hokkien actions and their outcomes were shaped or highly influenced by the prevailing agenda and political struggles of local rulers and/or colonial powers, resulting in selective adaptive behaviour as ‘challengers’ or ‘cooperators’. There were prominent immigrant Hokkien challengers to the status quo in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippine Islands, but both cooperators with the prevailing status quo and challengers to it were common in Hoi An, Vietnam. By contrast, cooperators were conspicuous in Batavia and in the colonial Dutch East Indies.

A Note on the Shipbuilding in Bengal in the Late Eighteenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhaswati Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
Shipbuilding Industry ◽  
The North ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Both overseas trade and shipbuilding in India are of great antiquity. But even for the early modern period, maritime commerce is relatively better documented than the shipbuilding industry. When the Portuguese and later the North Europeans entered the intra-Asian trade, many of the ships they employed in order to supplement their shipping in Asia were obtained from the Indian dockyards. Detailed evidence with regard to shipbuilding, however, is very rare. It has been pointed out that the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were more particular than their North-European counter-parts in the following centuries in providing information on seafaring and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding on the west coast has been discussed more than that on the eastern coast of India, particularly the coast of Bengal. Though Bengal had a long tradition of shipbuilding, direct evidence of shipbuilding in the region is rare. Many changes were brought about in the history of India and the Indian Ocean trade of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1750s. When the English became the largest carriers of Bengal's trade with other parts of Asia, this had an impact on the shipbuilding in Bengal. It was in their interest that the British in Bengal had their ships built in that province.

A Welcome Conversation: Toward a New Historiography of Intellectual Property

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 1113-1129
Author(s):  
Kali Murray
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay considers what tools should be used to study the legal history of intellectual property. I identify three historiographical strategies: narration, contest, and formation. Narration identifies the diverse “narrative structures” that shape the field of intellectual property history. Contest highlights how the inherent instability of intellectual property as a legal concept prompts recurrent debates over its meaning. Formation recognizes how intellectual property historians can offer insight into broader legal history debates over how to consider the relationship between informal social practices and formalized legal mechanisms. I consider Kara W. Swanson's Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk and Sperm in Modern America (2014) in light of these historiographical strategies and conclude that Swanson's book guides us to a new conversation in the legal history of intellectual property law.

Judges, Juries, and the History of Criminal Appeals

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-302
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Criminal Procedure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early History ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
History Of

The three articles offered in this forum on the early history of criminal appeals do us the great service of adding much of interest on this important but neglected issue in the development of Anglo–North American criminal procedure. The opaqueness of the legal history of criminal appeals stands in stark contrast to their centrality and apparent naturalness in contemporary criminal justice systems in England, Canada, and the United States. These three papers look at the period leading up to and immediately following the creation of the first formalized system of what we might call criminal appeals, the establishment of the Court of Crown Cases Reserved (CCCR) in 1848. This key period in the development of the adversary criminal trial was marked by both a concerted political effort to codify and rationalize the criminal law and by profound structural changes in the management of criminal justice.

Past Belief

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.

Respectable Mistresses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Sexually Active ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

scholarly journals Midwifery and Maternity Care for Single Mothers in Eighteenth-Century Wales

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-416
Author(s):  
Angela Joy Muir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Pregnant Women ◽  
Single Mothers ◽  
Maternity Care ◽  
Homogeneous Group ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Safe Delivery ◽  
History Of Childbirth ◽  
History Of

Summary The history of childbirth in England has gained increasing momentum, but no studies have been carried out for Wales, and therefore the nature of childbirth in early modern Wales remains largely unknown. This article seeks to redress this imbalance in two ways: First, by examining Welsh parish, court and ecclesiastical records for evidence of those who attended parturient women. This evidence demonstrates that Welsh midwives were not a homogeneous group who shared a common status and experience, but were a diverse mix of practitioners drawn from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Secondly, by assessing the care these practitioners provided to some of the most marginalised in Welsh society: unmarried pregnant women. Parish resources were limited, and poor law provision often covered only what was considered absolutely necessary. Analysis of what was deemed essential for the safe delivery of illegitimate infants provides a revealing glimpse of to the ‘ceremony of childbirth’ in eighteenth-century Wales.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document